Politics of reward and punishment being played again in West Bengal

The political class generally shares a love-hate relationship with the media. Parties shower accolades on newspapers and TV channels when the coverage suits them. Equally, they turn on the same networks for putting out information detrimental to their image.

If the BJP praises the media for highlighting the lack of accountability in the 1984 Sikh massacre, the Congress supports it when revelations are made about the Modi administration's collusion in the 2002 Gujarat riots. Bengal's CM Mamata Banerjee, however, seems to have elevated this friend-foe relationship to new and alarming heights.

In a circular issued by the Trinamool government on March 14, the dispensation banned several newspapers, including the largest circulated Bengali daily from the state's 2,500-odd public libraries. The papers that have received her benediction are those that back the CM and her government uncritically.

Given the serious implications of this oblique censorship, it may be only appropriate to describe the government's decision as symptomatic of Mamata's vindictiveness against critical sections of the media. Read this latest fiat alongside Mamata's recent decision to send three journalists, two of them editors of publications favourable to her regime, to the Rajya Sabha as TMC candidates.

It is disturbing to find the politics of reward and punishment, mastered to perfection by the earlier Left Front, being played out all over again in Bengal, even after the state had its long-awaited regime change. Ironically, Mamata had used the very same media she has now turned against in her recent and dramatic journey to Writers' Building.

We can see that at the heart of the present controversy lies the political class' quintessential anxiety over today's easy and unbridled flow of information. That almost all major news-breaks in India happen via leaks is testimony to the volatile nature of the media. This was the reason behind Kapil Sibal's attempts to turn the screws on defiant and immensely public-friendly social media networks.

State officials have to strain more and more to keep information under 'control', using euphemisms like anti-national, conspiracy, hurting communitarian sensibilities and so on. Similarly, Mamata wants to use Writers' Building to send her critics an intimidating message.

Information, always a potent tool of empowerment, is today more than ever a way of radicalising knowledge. New revelations are blowing the lid off hitherto-closely-guarded secrets, whether in the world of politics, business or society. And who knew and even benefitted from it better than Mamata Banerjee?

It was the power of knowledge channelled through expanding information networks that had aided her to leverage revelations about CPI-M-sponsored violence in Singur and Nandigram. Almost every section of the media had then backed Mamata to the hilt. But the mood swiftly veered to the other direction within months of Mamata's ascendancy to power.

No doubt the CM has been at the receiving end of harsh criticism from large sections of the media. Whether or not she has deserved such sweeping indictment on all counts is a separate issue that could even open up fractious debates about economic models, federal tensions and so on.

But by slapping a circular, tantamount to gagging information that ought to be freely accessed by Bengal's ordinary citizens, Mamata has confirmed her critics' indictment of her autocratic functioning.

Unfortunately for Bengal, there seems to have been no genuine break from the politics of vendetta practised by the CPI-M for more than three decades.

Barely a year ago, Mamata had revived hopes of a deeply disillusioned electorate. Charmed by her party's slogan of ' poribortan' (transformation), they keenly awaited the manifestations of a renewal of not only politics but political culture as well.

The large number of artists and intellectuals who joined the transformative electoral process may well have reasons for disquiet today. Mamata's virtual ban on newspapers is frighteningly similar to the CPI-M's hounding of artistes who dared to stage plays on Nandigram or about the Left Front's degeneration.

Bratya Basu, radical theatre director and now education minister in the Trinamool regime, or an ally like Arpita Ghosh who couldn't stage Poshu Khamar, a play based on Orwell's Animal Farm, during the Left Front regime, couldn't surely be at ease with the way things are unravelling under Mamata. For now, they may dodge discomfiting questions about Mamata and her inexplicable actions. But for how long?